Broadridge surveyed 950 financial services industry participants.
Tokenisation has become the natural next step for financial services firms after introducing artificial intelligence (AI) to their businesses, according to research by Broadridge.
AI has already started to streamline how many firms operate, and adding tokenisation to this will create a path to near instant settlement of transactions (T+0), rather than the current T+1 or T+2, Broadridge said in its 2026 Digital Transformation & Next-Gen Technology Study.
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The fintech firm polled 950 financial services industry participants to understand how financial technology is expected to evolve over the coming years.
It found 54% of the firms surveyed were making "moderate to large" investments in tokenisation and digital asset infrastructure.
Other notable findings included 55% of participants backing blockchain technology as a way to unlock new growth opportunities for their company. This was up markedly on 42% in last year's study.
The report also provided an updated analysis of AI adoption in the industry. The report found it has accelerated dramatically, with four in five firms (80%) using generative or predictive AI in operations, up from just 31% last year.
This reflects a "rapid move" from pilot programmes to enterprise deployment, it stated.
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Firms said AI was delivering the greatest business impact among next-generation technologies, surpassing cloud technology, the report noted.
Of the firms polled, 72% were making "moderate to large" generative AI investments.
Germán Soto Sanchez, chief product and strategy officer at Broadridge Financial Solutions, said: "AI proved the industry can modernise at speed. Tokenisation is the next leap forward that will re-architect markets.
"It is clear financial services firms see tokenisation is a long-term structural evolution to financial market infrastructure that delivers efficiency, transparency, and liquidity."
Richard Baker, CEO and founder of UK fintech firm Tokenovate, added: "Tokenisation is becoming increasingly embedded in market infrastructure. As investment increases and timelines compress, post-trade can no longer rely on manual interpretation, fragmented data and batch-based processing.
According to the chief executive, "faster cycles and 24/7 trading models place increasing pressure on workflows" and that was never designed for continuous markets.
"Tokenisation must therefore go beyond simply digitising assets and focus on automating the contractual lifecycle itself, embedding standards-based logic, supported by frameworks such as the Common Domain Model, to ensure consistency, interoperability, and legal certainty across platforms," he explained.
